Four Hundred Days Til Re-entry

The furious rate of posting continues...

..but will soon slow down. I am into the spring break proper, and wallowing in my freedom to do little every day.

Yesterday got eaten up helping Rob escape from his apartment. To my certain knowlege he never cleaned the place in the two years he was there, so a whole two years of dust and garbage needed disposing of in just under three days. By the time we arrived Rob and his girlfriend Mio were outside the front door looking bleary-eyed.

"What time did you get up?"
"We've been cleaning since five AM."

It was three o'clock at the time, so they had been at it for ten hours. Aparently, the inside was now clear of detritus. Very clearly, though, most of what had been inside was now outside on the pavement. During the previous week we had recieved a whole bunch of random items including English teaching detritus (dice, magnetic letters), drinking detritus (the cork-screw had been given away before all the wine bit the dust), cooking detritus (mixer, bread-knife) and household leftovers such as six boxes of washing powder. Most of this is useful stuff as I have moved house many, many times and I know that stuff recieved because "it might come in useful" will be a pain in the neck later on, viz all the stuff on the floor in front of Robs house.

By four-thrity we had distributed a bunch of stuff around the neighbourhood. My mate C, up the road, lost the moral high-ground early on in the process and so had to put a brave face on a wider selection of goods than she might have been expecting. That'll teach her to oversleep. Having made some kind of vague promise to help / see him off, she was unnable to resist much of the stuff we had turned down. Plant pots, more washing powder, cushions and a tako-yaki-making-device were amongst the high-lights. For those of you who don't know, tako yaki is an octopus ball coated in stuff like pancake batter with thick sweet sauce and flakes of dry fish on top. The item itself is a cast iron tray half an inch thick with hemi-spherical indentations in it. She recieved it exactly like a guy recieving a present of a candle set. She is a creative lass so I assume she will find something to do with it.



The final amount of luggage amounted to a trifling fifteen bags or so. You can see Rob above staggering under their weight for the three meters to the back of the car. The plan was that all of this was going to be carried on the train, changing trains three times on the way, to Mios flat in Osaka. We took ten minutes to admire the masterful planning involved.

After this there just remained a quick jaunt to the railway station. Thing went downhill after Rob said, "good-bye house." We had "good-bye" to houses, trees, roads, mountains, restaurants, the cementworks, etc., etc. Luckily it is only a ten minute drive to the station. After a brief interlude at the local Baskin Robins, the ice-cream shop, it was manly handshakes, promises to keep in touch and a brief tragi-comic moment as two people got 80 kg of bags up the flight of steps to the ticket counter. Now Rob is off to India after a brief stoppover snowboarding in Hokkaido.

And I have 362 days left to work, 398 days left before I too am off somewhere new, or at least different.

posted by Between daisies @ 09:59